The field of the disclosure relates generally to production forecasting, and more specifically, to methods and systems for optimizing production forecasts using statistically prioritized discrete modeling methodology.
Generally, existing production lines and final assembly areas were not originally designed to meet the rapid turnaround times that permeate today's production environments. However, knowledgeable teams of people have managed to implement efficient methods for achieving most of the requirement associated with a rapid. However, some areas within a production enterprise still require improvement. One example is the functional test areas associated with aircraft manufacture and delivery. The extended flow time in the functional test areas often require additional inventory and may influence delivery schedules since most functional test jobs are directly related to other installation jobs.
The tasks in a functional test area of an aircraft manufacturing enterprise currently do not have firm predecessor and/or successor relationships for and among the individual tasks. As a result, a major problem exists in that there is no tool that exists that will dynamically re-schedule these functional test jobs in a very fast fashion. Starting times, durations, and ending times of most functional jobs, including those associated with the functional test areas mentioned above, vary greatly due to the dynamic nature of the production environment.
One existing method is to manually adjust job schedules by doing a cut and paste within computer-generated “bar-charts”. These bar-charts are a representation of the Gantt chart. Currently, utilization of manually and computer-generated Gantt charts align the several tasks of a production environment. However, these procedures are not adaptable with the speed, agility, and complexity of, for example, an aircraft production system.
Such existing solutions often require that many engineers and schedulers spend close to one day or longer to re-generate a new set of “bar-charts” based on the changes in the production environment. The disadvantage of the existing solutions is that they are a bit too slow and also require too much manual input. The limitation of the existing bar-chart solution is that it can not take advantage of moving some of the jobs that have a range of possible execution times. Finally, the existing bar-chart solution cannot detect which jobs are more important than others in the immediate future, without a very time consuming exercise of cross referencing among, for example, teams of people on the shop floor.